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The field of this application relates to apparatus, methods, and computer program products relating to network management operations and particularly to apparatus, methods, and computer program products for providing transactional support for network management operations.
Particular current network management applications conduct individual network management operations on remote network objects taken one at a time. Remote network objects accordingly receive individual attention at discrete separated times only. The target network objects, however, are numerous, complex, and interrelated. Managing network objects one at a time is unfortunately slow and often ineffective. In many cases, desired object interactions cannot be induced to cooperative action by addressing the target objects individually in isolation from other target objects. To overcome this technical problem, the target objects need to be addressed more comprehensively by making real time adjustments upon multiple remote network objects which are interrelated and interdependent.
At present, network management applications build and send network management operations to network objects one operation at a time. Particular current network management protocols lack the capability of performing a sequence of heterogeneous network management operations over a number of managed objects such that this sequence of operations is committed either atomically or not at all. It therefore becomes the responsibility of a network management platform to attempt to provide transactional integrity around a sequence of heterogeneous network management operations. However, no known network management protocol, platform, or product has any built-in mechanism to provide for the atomic execution of an arbitrary sequence of network management operations within the context of a single transaction.
According to the present invention, an application transaction is implemented as a group of network management request operations which are bound together into a single atomically-committed transaction. An application transaction thus binds together several message request operations and is committed atomically. The combined transaction is further, on the request of the network management application, aborted atomically according to the present invention. An application transaction according to one embodiment of the present invention combines a plurality of network management requests in a single comprehensive bound application transaction which is delimited by a semantic begin transaction directive and either a commit or a roll-back directive, which maintains transactional integrity of multiple user applications including a plurality of network management requests relating to these applications and message operations which are bound into a single application transaction.
According to the present invention, a mechanism for a network management platform enables a user to specify transactional delimiters around an arbitrary sequence of heterogenous management requests. The platform according to the present invention ensures that these requests are committed atomically (i.e., all together or not at all).